The Reluctant Beloved in Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”
In reading Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” as a Modernist poem, one may ask, “What makes this poem a Modernist poem?” Upon further reflection, one can see some Modernist themes in this poem of eight stanzas such as the decay of traditional religion and thus the disjunction between Man and the Divine, e.g. “Divinity must live within herself” (23), the use of concrete images, like “coffee and oranges” (2), and the wistful looking back of a wholeness that is lost, e.g., “where, then, is paradise?” (50). These are only some themes that make “Sunday Morning” a distinctly Modernist poem. Moreover, like Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which veils its theme of Christian redemption under the guise of inoffensive, obscure, Eastern religion and banal, even tawdry concrete images, Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” veils its theme of Christian incarnation and the mystery of Mary’s annunciation under the voice’s persistence of the dead Christian God, an emphasis of natural images (like birds and deer), and the banal setting of late Sunday breakfast “in a sunny chair” in one’s dressing gown. In other words, the voice of the poem, the unnamed “She” who ruminates about the loss of the Divine all Sunday morning and even into evening instead of going into church, must be a “She” because she is the Beloved of the Divine Lover, and the dramatic movement of the poem is her (and thus “our,” i.e. Mankind’s) imaginative journey from her “Complacencies” (1), or self-satisfaction, through her realization of her “need of some imperishable bliss” (62), to her openness to the ambiguity of receiving the awful, death gift of the Incarnation, thus fully realizing her previous, nascent thought, “Divinity must live within herself.”
The first stanza starts with the everyday setting of a self-satisfied woman who starts to daydream of a Fall, but the everyday setting disappears into her dream. At first, her complacencies of being home in her dressing gown, her banal breakfast of “late / Coffee and oranges” and her pet cockatoo all serve “to dissipate/ The holy rush of ancient sacrifice.” (1-5). But despite these trappings, she cannot help but “dream… and… feel… / … that old catastrophe” (6-7). The fact that she does dream of and feels a loss of some type of wholeness, as opposed to covering up the dreaming and feeling of this loss with more banality like Eliot’s Londonites in The Wasteland, opens her to an imaginative journey that will lead her through the day as a type of river of the dead, hinting perhaps the Styx but also the Jordan, since the journey leads her “to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” where her true journey begins.
In the second stanza, one sees the effect of this past Fall, which is the death of the Divine, which is no longer active on the earth, and the belief that the Self and the visible, everyday reality of the Earth is the only Reality of the soul. The stanza lists the sun, fruit, and her cockatoo’s wings as equivalent to “the thought of heaven” (22). It lists the temporal passing of weather and the seasons as “the measures destined for her soul” (30). With the loss of the Divine, her soul is circumscribed in a time which, as one realizes, has no Spring, i.e., has no birth.
Arriving at the lack of birth, the woman’s thoughts turn to a type of Divinity before the Christian God, in which Jove is the Lover and Man is the Beloved. Jove’s Divinity is purely “inhuman” (31), but his love is for the human, “our blood” (36), which mingles with the Divine and brings forth a “paradise” (40), a union of Divine and Human. But the truth of this past myth seems to come into doubt when she moves from past tense (i.e., this happened in the past) to future tense (i.e., this hasn’t happened but perhaps will). She says, “The sky will be much friendlier then than now, / … Not this dividing and indifferent blue.” (42-45). The paradox of “will be” with “then” not only shows a sadness of what is lost – one cannot get to God or there is no God or God is indifferent – but also a truth that this myth of Divine and human blood mingling is atemporal, not circumscribed by the weather and seasons that trap the woman’s soul in Stanza II.
Stanza IV shows the movement of her detached content, which is her previous complacency, to a desire for visible traces of what was lost in three parts. The first part, lines 46 through 50, speak of her contentment when the Spirit, as “wakened birds” (46) – in contrast to the dead Divine who are only silent shadows in dreams as seen in Stanza II – come down to a pre-Fall earth, the “misty fields” (48). But the catastrophe has happened, and there are no visible traces of the Spirit, as seen in the second part (51-7), with the negative repetition “not,” “nor,” and “neither.” The turn happens when she realizes that the only trace of the Divine after the catastrophe is within her, “her remembrance of awakened birds / Or her desire for June and evening, tipped / By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.” (58-60). She realizes that she is not satisfied but has a deep, invisible need, the “need of some imperishable bliss,” (61) which begins the next stanza.
The fifth and sixth stanzas depict the irony of “Death is the mother of beauty” (63), i.e., Death, or man’s mortality, spurs love, and without Death, there is no beauty in Paradise. The images of Death as spurring love are reminiscent of Herrick’s “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” of young maidens and youths among plucked fruit and “littering leaves” (74-5). In contrast, the images of a Paradise without the “change of death” are reminiscent of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” but with a negative light, as emphasized in the words, “They never” and “Alas” (81,82,85). The woman’s thoughts declare again, “Death is the mother of beauty” (88), which intimately links Death with generation, with life, with birth.
Stanza VII shifts to the “ring of men” whose song speaks of death, return, and traces of their existence. In another place, sometime in the future (as seen in the future tense “shall”), her thoughts move to a ring of men whose chanting will be a “devotion” (93), born from “their blood” (97). These men will “perish” (103), but they will leave traces of their existence, of their past and their future, manifested by the “dew upon their feet” (105) and the “choir among themselves long afterward” (101). She sees herself among these future ring of men, these poets, whose song create a Paradise out of their blood, just like her reception of what will fill her “need of some imperishable bliss” will create a Paradise out of her blood.
By the last stanza, she is prepared to hear the message, her strange annunciation, which announce the breaking of the lifeless cycle of Deathless time. “The tomb in Palestine/ Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” (107-9) The voice that cries to her say “lay” – past tense. Jesus is not in his grave; God is not dead. She thinks of human life without the Divine; it is “chaos,” solitude,” and “inescapable” (110-13). But she feels the coming of the Divine – the tactile traces of Jove’s hinds – “Deer walk upon our mountains” (114)-- and the aural traces of the awakened birds – “the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” (115). Death has unfrozen the deathless fruit – “Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness” (116) – in preparation of the union of the Lover with his Beloved. In an imaginative journey that started on Sunday morning and ending “At evening,” the awakened birds – the Spirit of Stanza IV -- are descending with “Ambiguous undulations…/ Downward to darkness” which is her body, for a second Incarnation. Her journey has ended, and she is whole again.
Thus, Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” is the journey of the Reluctant Beloved to accept her Lover and the imaginative, poetic gift of the Divine “commingling” with the human, the Incarnation. As mentioned earlier, such a comic Christian drama overtly portrayed would be dead and wooden in the Modern world, and, like Eliot, Stevens veils this movement with the setting – not a church – and the thoroughly Modern woman who asks why she should even bother with love – after all, she is alone in her breakfast. The ending remains ambiguous – i.e., paradoxical – because with the beauty of the gift comes death, which, to the Modern world of avoiding death, avoiding, to use Heidegger’s term, the Abyss, does not seem to be a happy ending.
Work Cited
Stevens, Wallace. "Sunday Morning." The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry 2nd ed. Eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. New York: Norton, 1988. 281-84.
© 4 October 2000 Rufel F. Ramos